Who gained most from the Industrial Revolution?

The short answer

• Coal-powered productivity. Coal-powered machinery multiplied what each worker could produce. Britain mined about 287 million tons in 1913, its all-time peak, exporting about a third to fuel other countries’ ships and factories. Coal, capital and skills gave countries the means to build industrial wealth; countries without them, or prevented from using them, fell behind. Access to energy helped establish the divergence.
• Diffusion through states and markets. Countries that followed Britain did more than import its machines. Germany, the United States and Japan protected young industries, built railways and educated engineers. German investment banks supplied long-term industrial loans, while Japan’s Meiji government, the modernizing regime that took power in 1868, built model factories. By 1914 several industrial countries competed for markets, resources and colonies. Their success depended on adapting borrowed methods to local conditions.
• Empire and unequal exchange. Colonial rule and unequal treaties placed much of Asia and Africa in the position of supplying raw materials and buying manufactures. The treaties forced weaker states to accept low tariffs, or import taxes. Guaranteed returns for foreign investors and forced labor, including in the Congo Free State, King Leopold II of Belgium’s private colony, also directed gains toward industrial powers. Tan and blue on the 1914 map show the system’s reach. Political power helped determine who benefited from the technology.
• Workers and voters organised. Early industrial Britain’s losers organized to change their circumstances. Luddites smashed machines; Chartists demanded votes for working men; trade unionists and socialists built movements that helped win the vote, legal unions and early welfare laws. Similar movements spread across Europe, the United States and Japan. Their pressure helps explain why incomes became more equal after mid-century, although wealth did not. Reform came from below as well as from governments.

What it changed

An industrial war. The First World War drew on steel, chemicals, railways and factories across whole economies. This was total war, using a nation’s economic resources for fighting; machine guns, heavy artillery and poison gas appeared on a scale the American Civil War had only foreshadowed. Estimates of military deaths range from about 9 to 11 million. The industrial powers had traded more with one another in 1913 than ever before. Interdependence alone had not kept the peace.

Catching up, slowly. Only in the late twentieth century did the Great Divergence between the industrial West and the rest begin to narrow. After 1945 many former colonies sought to industrialize behind tariffs, or import taxes. From the 1950s Japan, followed by South Korea, Taiwan and finally China, combined state guidance, protection and exports, as earlier latecomers such as Germany had done. Their success shows that later policy could alter conditions behind the nineteenth-century gap, including capital, technology and the power to set tariffs.

The carbon century. Coal and later oil powered the twentieth century. Atmospheric carbon dioxide rose from about 280 parts per million before industrialization to about 300 by 1914 and passed 400 in the 2010s. Arvid Högbom and Svante Arrhenius were among the first scientists to connect coal burning with a warmer planet. They worked in the industrial world on this map; the costs they glimpsed are now global.